Members of the Payne Cemetery Association, Inc., assisted by various community members, last Monday, Nov. 9, succeeded in preserving an artifact associated with the naming and history of the Lone Rock Church in northern Harrison County.
This effort consisted of moving a very large granite boulder, known locally as the “Lone Rock”, from its previous resting place in a pasture approximately one and one-half miles southwest of the Lone Rock Church, to a place of prominence directly in front of the church. Although no longer active, this church, now owned by the Association, was built in 1893 by local members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and was named after the namesake stone which played a large part in the creation and development of Payne Cemetery, and soon after, the building of the church near the cemetery.
Verbal history, passed through the generations, tells the story of a pioneer family traveling through the area in the middle of the 1800’s in a covered wagon failing to see the boulder due to the tall prairie grass. The family had the misfortune of having a wagon wheel strike the stone, throwing a young child into the stone, killing the child instantly.
Having just previously passed through a small clearing, and needing a place to bury the child, they returned to the clearing and made the burial there. Documented history tells that in later years other burials were made in this location and in 1887 an acre of land was deeded by the landowner, Squire Payne, for use as a free cemetery, available to all without charge, and the cemetery was named in his honor.
In 1882, Mr. Payne donated and deeded another acre of land, adjacent to the cemetery, for the purpose of building a church, named Lone Rock, thus establishing the historical connection to the “Lone Rock” that rested in the field near the church.
As sometimes occurs with such endeavors, the actual size and weight of the rock was initially under-estimated and it was soon determined that the plan to raise and load the rock on a trailer by use of tractor-equipped front-end loaders was neither feasible nor advisable, association members said. This necessitated a different approach to the problem and it was decided that the most likely method of successfully relocating the rock was by using a board member’s backhoe to roll it onto some type of skid so it could then to be dragged to the desired location.
Fortunately, another of the board members had been given access to a friend’s scrap steel pile which contained two half-inch thick plates of steel which were welded together to create a platform long enough to hold the rock and allowed it to be dragged by a dual-wheeled tractor with the necessary traction to skid the rock nearly two miles on gravel roads.
Due to its irregular shape, accurate weight of the boulder is very difficult to estimate without access to a scale, but using estimated dimensions of 4’ x 4’ x 8’, it is believed that the rock weighs at least 11,500 pounds, nearly six tons, which required much care to prevent accidents or injuries. The Payne Cemetery Association, Inc., appreciated the owners of the property from which the stone was taken to allow its removal for historical purposes and to prevent the possibility that the stone would simply be shoved in a ditch to get it out of the way for farming sometime in the future. The cemetery association also thanked Lyle Parkhurst and Harold Kinder for their assistance.